CFTC reportedly investigates Adam Kinzinger over Kalshi pardon bets

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is investigating former Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois over Kalshi trades tied to his presidential pardon, Politico reported, citing three people with knowledge of the matter. The trades were made through an account linked to Kinzinger in December 2024 and January 2025. Kinzinger told Politico he bet on whether he would personally receive a pardon. Kinzinger said he also bet on whether President Joe Biden would issue preemptive pardons before leaving office. Biden preemptively pardoned Kinzinger and other members of the House committee that investigated the January 6 attack on the Capitol in his final hours in January 2025. Donald Trump had called for the committee members to be jailed. Screenshots Kinzinger provided showed he made $823 on the trades. Kinzinger said he placed around 25 trades at the time and lost money on most of them. Kinzinger denies wrongdoing. Kinzinger said he had been out of office for two years when he placed the bets and was neither a congressman nor a candidate. Kinzinger said he had no inside information and had never discussed the pardons with anyone. Kinzinger said he read Kalshi's rules beforehand and understood them to prohibit trades by users who could influence an outcome, worked for the relevant agency or held nonpublic information about it. Kalshi prohibits users from betting on contracts in which they are direct participants. The CFTC bans the use of material nonpublic information on the markets it regulates. Kalshi has also been reviewing the transactions. The CFTC and Kalshi declined to comment to Politico. Kinzinger said neither had contacted him about the investigation. Kalshi suspended three congressional candidates in April over bets on their own races. Kalshi froze former Representative George Santos's account and referred him to the CFTC and the Justice Department over bets against his own attendance at the State of the Union. Santos had publicly said he would attend. Kalshi banned Santos for life in late August. In a Substack post last November, Kinzinger criticized markets on the conduct of individual members of Congress. Kinzinger cited contracts on which senator would first visit Syria and how each member would vote on releasing the Epstein files. Kinzinger called such markets a "corruption time bomb" and argued that letting legislators bet on their own behavior threatens democracy. Kinzinger now says he is broadly pleased with how Kalshi's screening has developed. In a March 2025 post, Trump called the pardons "void" and said the recipients were "subject to investigation at the highest level". The White House declined to comment to Politico. CFTC staff warned exchanges last week that contracts settling on a named individual's words or conduct should be presumed open to manipulation. A month earlier, the CFTC fined a former White House teleprompter operator $172,000 over trades on presidential mention markets.